The Windows 8.1 Store: Much improved, but still a long way off iOS and Android

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The last major feature that we want to talk about is Windows Store/Bing integration. Say you heard a friend talk about Jetpack Joyride, but you can’t recall the exact name of the game. Under Windows 8.1, you can type “Windows Jetpack game” on the Start Screen, and wind up with the following:

This is precisely the kind of intelligent integration we called for a year ago and are glad to see Microsoft pursuing. The ability to use the browser to help with app discovery is something MS can rightly talk up as a strong point for its own brand.

The not-quite-there-yets

There are still places where Microsoft could improve the experience. We’d prefer to see the return of the “Sort by…” options and the Free/Paid/Both boxes. Some of the categorization is unclear — what, precisely, is the difference between “Trending” and “New and Rising?” There’s also no way to launch an application from the installation page. That’s made somewhat more frustrating because, if you don’t change your launch page to “Apps,” you’re stuck hitting the Windows Key, hitting the down arrow (no keyboard shortcut to jump to the Apps Menu), and then digging the application out that way.

These are all relatively small issues individually, but they still clutter up the corners. The dearth of default applications for certain services is still a problem, as is the way official applications are, or aren’t separated from the unofficial ones. Here’s the results of a search for Facebook, one of the few high-profile web services which actually has a Metro client.

From a brand management perspective, this really sucks. Tons of apps with extremely similar branding, none of which are required to note that they aren’t the actual FB app. This matters, in W8, because the permissions an application claims to function as a glorified Facebook front-end can be vastly different than the requirements Facebook itself would set.

Still, these are relatively small issues compared to the strength of the general product. Content, admittedly, is still somewhat lacking — you won’t find apps for Instagram, Tumblr, or Imgur, for example. The “Games” page is still mostly mobile/tablet products. Fans hoping for full Xbox 360/Xbox One integration are going to have to keep hoping. What’s changed in 12 months, however, is that the Windows Store no longer feels like a badly designed storefront for questionable goods. That’s a huge step from where things were, and the layout/categorization improvements demonstrate that Metro-style applications don’t have leave acres of empty space and rely on minimally functional UIs.

I’m still not ready to recommend Windows 8 over Windows 7 for everyday, normal use, but the improvement over 8.1 leaves me thinking that by this time next year, that situation could change. If Microsoft continues to improve things at this pace, Windows 9 could be the OS that offers users a compelling reason to finally upgrade.

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Ray C

Ok about 85% of this article talks about what has improved in Windows store. Most of the negatives to me are not really major. I do think the Windows Store needs to continue to improve, but let’s not forget that this is the first update to it. How long have the others been trying to perfect their stores? My only question is if most of the article is about the improvements, why does the title lead you to believe that most of the article is going to be about what is not right in the store?

aussieaussieaussie

Just downloaded it, I’m happy but I don’t think they understand what people wanted from the start button so I don’t think it’s necessary.

Joel Hruska

No, the Start Button decision appears to have been purely cosmetic, to give people a sense of having something to click on.

Neutrino .

“The Windows 8.1 Store”, what is there a separate version of the app store for each version of windows 8 ?

Joel Hruska

The comparison is between the W8.0 store and the Windows 8.1 store. There’s a new storefront that comes with Windows 8.1. I am uncertain if they pushed the update out to W8.0 as well, but it would make little sense to compare the two distinctly.

James Tolson

it is just pig shit blasphemy that microshaft have “copied” the consumer stealing penny pinching micro payment business model (from apple and android) full stop (excuse my french).. in my opinion it should not exist on windows as part of windows from microsoft..

it completely amazes me why most cannot see the woods for trees and have the pure insight and Ignorance to champion microsofts latest operating system efforts, they have not made an operating system since windows XP….

By the time Microshaft release Windows 9, everything you would have liked from windows 7 will all be gone completely.. from boot the only free to use Apps will (in the form of over bloated touch metro boxes) be a simple calender, clock, my media, task manager, notepad, internet explorer and App store.. everything and i mean EVERYTHING else will be a pay to download and use Application and im willing to bet my bottom dollar they will even sell a “desktop App” and even a Calculator.. and im even willing to bet that even to use your computer you need to be connected to the internet and have a Microsoft account.. hell they will even probably be selling Direct X as a separate component by then lmao, and then “windows 9″ program chooser (i won’t call it an OS) will still find a way to consume ridiculous amounts of RAM at boot…

I really hope they start changing their business strategy soon or they will be chapter 11 in just a few years.. (bah i HATE microshaft)

pixelstuff

“they have not made an operating system since windows XP”

They made Windows Vista and Windows 7 which are both operating systems. You need to be more accurate with your terminology.

If you think Windows XP was dramatically more different than Windows 2000, than Vista was from XP, and Windows 7 was from Vista, you are mistaken.

James Tolson

windows xp, is by default an over bloated windows 2000, however that can be rectified by disabling services and other tweaks, making windows xp the last fully featured usable operating system in my personal opinion.. from windows vista they added much more bloat that is harder to disable (making need 1gb and over to be useable at boot) but worse than that microsoft removed to much “legacy support” for hardware that was not necessary.. windows 7 (vista 1.1) was a big improvement over vista but they removed yet even more features.. making windows 7 the last useable modern OS, but to me windows Xp was the last fully featured operating system from microsoft, not 7..

pixelstuff

Your opinion is wrong from a logic point of view. XP is not fully featured once Vista and Windows 7 came out. For example no Windows Snap in XP; one of hundreds of features in Windows 7 that are not in Windows XP.

Just like Windows XP added features to Windows 2000 and caused it to suddenly lack features Windows Vista and 7 added features that made XP suddenly lack features. XP’s User security model is horrible; another example.

Other people have no trouble integrating new features from a new OS release into their daily activities and gaining enanced productivity from it (windows snap was one of those excellent features for me). Just because you apparently can’t or don’t want to, doesn’t make the OS a pointless “non-OS” and wasted effort from the developers.

I guess you should be glad you didn’t develop this limitation back in the days of Windows 3.1. Imagine how slow you would be trying to get work done if you thought that was the last fully featured operating system from Microsoft.

James Tolson

windows “snap?” (trying to stop myself falling on the floor laughing).. with respect my friend i would take functionality, usability and hardware support anyday over a simple GUI gimmick, seriously lol i would really prefer an OS that was command line only that caving in just because it has “SNAP!!”? lmao.. windows 3.11 was a joke (i was an amiga user back in those days), however at least windows 3.11 was useable, unfortunately windows 8 is NOT.. honestly if windows 3.11 was just an “online shop” there would be no Microsoft today, think about it :-)

Joel Hruska

Windows XP doesn’t sandbox applications as effectively as Windows 7 / 8 (for security purposes), lacks an accelerated GUI, lacks support for more than four CPU cores, lacks an understanding of AMD’s CMT implementation on its newer processor cores.

It doesn’t automatically handle TRIM. It can’t do “Snap,” or desktop peek. It doesn’t offer any sort of GPU-accelerated GUI, it can’t leverage any of the improvements to DIrectX 10/11, it doesn’t ship with IPV6 support enabled, doesn’t support multi-GPUs, and doesn’t offer any of the stability improvements baked into the new WDDM and Windows Audio driver models.

But — if you throw ALL of that out, then it’s pretty full featured.

James Tolson

lol, ok ill answer that in parts.. :-)

sandboxing – i half agree, however unlike windows 95/98/me windows NT whether windows 2000 or windows 8 runs applications in a protected mode that if it crashes it is killed by the hypervisor preventing the whole system being brought down, the reason why windows NT uses more ram, windows 8 adds to this for pure power users with the ability to run in a pure sandox mode, but to me this is no different than just running a critical app in virtual pc anyway? which works fine in xp..

accelerated gpu – windows Xp supports GDI+ hardware acceleration by default, vista onwards does not.. it is emulated, however if one uses the ugly “aero” theme then that uses direct 3d acceleration, this causes issues tho usually in web pages, this is the main reason why i stick to xp, as i love the classic theme, i can watch full hd web video fin in xp, windows 7 it is a slide show :-(

cpu support – 4 physical processors however unlimited cpu core support from service pack 3, as for amd specific instruction i can’t comment as im not sure on those..

trim – solid state flash bases hard drives, i can’t stand them lol anyway would never part from the traditional proper mechanical 3.5 hard disks, loved em from the old “winchester” to the day they do finally become obsolete (which won’t be anytime soon).. so for me that aint an issue..

direct x 10 and 11 – ok u have me there, however there aint no reason it cannot be added in by microsoft if they continued support, porting back wddm should be no real issue, they won’t tho, as they would never sell windows 7 or 8 if they did, im just lucky most games are still made to work with direct x 9 in mind..

windows audio – ? Sucks in vista onwards, seriously lol it is crippled cut down audio stack and codec support, it is that bad i have to download and install Ace’s mega codec pack in windows 7 just to use certain audio applications and games either that or put up with no sound at all…

so just to recap everything with the exception of direct x is fully supported in XP, uses less RAM and is much more useable.. i respect your opinions and views but honestly windows has been in a downward devolution wince XP, XP was their peak, future windows will just be an online shop “app store” and thats it, that is not an operating system.. :-)

Joel Hruska

So most of this is opinion, save for thing you brought about video being a slideshow in W7.

On what hardware? Are you decoding HD video on a really ancient rig or something?

Any computer built from 2006 should be able to handle HD video decode. The various drivers from NV and AMD included this capability in both operating systems.

James Tolson

my rig is AMD FX 60 sitting on an Asus A8v Deluxe 939 board with 3gb ddr ram, AMD Agp 4670HD 1gb Video card, and Audigy 2 pro Sound card.. this works great in both xp and windows 7, except those issues i mentioned, infact the only reason i duel booted 7 was to play the odd direct x 10 game, however now i don’t bother so i deleted the win 7 partition and stick to XP, no issues at all with XP, windows 7 was a nightmare at times from Timeout detection errors, to stuttering video, and as im a retro gamer i cannot even plug in my GAMEPORT devices, or use my parallel port 24 pin printers, serial cables for data transfer.. drivers for AGP gart are bad, as well as drivers from creative for my sound card… and on top of that my web cam and hauppage PCI Video capture card is totally unsupported in windows 7.. apart from that tho it works ok im just not bothered in “SNAP” lol i just like my hardware to work

mmmmmbop

Windows 8.1 doesn’t need thousands and thousands of apps because it has this interesting thing that I like to call “a real web browser” which by itself can replace a half million of the apps on iOS.

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